SMART
When the real life disappoints, as it is wont to do, human beings often take comfort in fiction, imagining an alternate reality where our problems aren’t so daunting and where we aren’t so fallible. We dream, in short, of a…
Category: russia
Ros-Lehtinen on Arms Control
Ok, this is just downright weird. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen rounds up the usual crowd to co-sponsor an utterly meaningless “Sense of the House” on the START Treaty. (Utterly meaningless since the Senate ratifies treaties. I don’t even want to hear about…
Revisiting Votkinsk
Nicholas Kralev has an interesting story on the impending closure of the Votkinsk Portal Monitoring Facility. The key grafs confirm that rumor that the Bush Administration made the concession to Russian on ending monitoring at Votkinsk in November 2008: Congressional…
V-Poot, Hip Hop Fan
Posted without comment.
Votkinsk Portal Monitoring Facility
Credit: Otto Stokes Within the community, we have been going back and forth on whether the United States is still present at Russia’s Votkinsk Machine Building Plant. As far as I can tell, the US still staffs the Votkinsk Portal…
Lugar on START Verification
Now, that was what I was talking about. Dick Lugar, one of the old bulls of the Senate, has introduced a bill, S.2727, to extend, on a reciprocal basis, the inspections under START for another six months. (More precisely, it…
Dead Hand, START and Strategy Stability
Last week, the Senate Republican Policy Committee released this execrable document, START: Do Time Extension Instead of a Bad Treaty, on the New START treaty. Today, I finagled a copy of a memo that Senator Kyl’s staff has distrubuted in…
Can CTM Bust Russian Silos?
The Russians have made a lot of noise about the possibility that advanced conventional weapons in the US arsenal place their nuclear forces at risk and, as a corollary, that certain capabilities should be included in future arms control negotiations.…
The Kataev Archive
Holy cow. When I read Pavel Podvig’s excellent “The Window of Vulnerability That Wasn’t: Soviet Military Buildup in the 1970s,” I was struck at his sourcing: The main source of these data is the archival collection of Vitalii Kataev at…
START Follow On Sessions
I keep hearing that there have been four rounds of START Follow On negotiations — but that omits two Presidential Summits, a meeting between lead negotiators in Rome and at least two “experts” meetings. So I’ve tried to collect all…